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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 19:3 (2022) ► pp.508–536

The role of referent cohesiveness in variable subject expression in L2 Spanish

| Grand Valley State University
| Indiana University

This study examines the development of variable subject expression in Spanish across multiple proficiency levels of second-language learners. We employ a cross-sectional design and a written contextualized task in order to explore the differences in rates of subject forms as well as the degree to which factors related to referent cohesiveness constrain the acquisition of subject expression. We include a group of native speakers from the same community of practice for comparison. Our results suggest that, although learners appear to acquire native-like rates of subject forms, this process takes several years. Additionally, the rates of selection of forms were similar for the native speakers and the most advanced non-native speakers, but there remained important differences between these groups across the categories of the referent cohesiveness variable. Finally, we show that the various factors used to operationalize referent cohesiveness do not influence subject expression uniformly.

Keywords: second language acquisition, subject expression, language variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Variable Subject Expression
    • 1.2Subject expression in L2 Spanish
    • 1.3Summary
  • 2.The current study
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Elicitation tasks
    • 2.3Analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Results for Referent Cohesiveness
    • 3.2Results for the individual sub-factors
    • 3.3Results for revised Referent Cohesiveness
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion and future directions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.19029.lin
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